1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to production, simulation and testing systems, and more particularly, to methods and systems for simulating a vehicle component capable of communicating with a telematics system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The electronic content and sophistication of automotive designs has grown markedly. Microprocessors are prevalent in a growing array of automotive information, entertainment, safety and control functions. Consequently, this electronic content is playing an increasing role in the sales and revenues of the automakers. The features provided by the electronic content include audio systems, vehicle stability control, driver activated power train controls, adaptive cruise control, route mapping, collision warning systems, etc. The significant increase of the electronic content of land based vehicles has concomitantly occurred with the explosive growth of the Internet and the associated data driven applications supplied through mobile applications.
Telematics, a broad term that refers to vehicle-based wireless communication systems and information services, promises to combine vehicle safety, entertainment and convenience features through wireless access to distributed networks, such as the Internet. Telematics offers the promise to move away from the hardware-centric model from audio and vehicle control systems that are built into devices that are custom designed for each vehicle, to infotainment delivered by plug-and-play hardware whose functionality can be upgraded through software loads or simple module replacement. Furthermore, new revenue streams will be opened up to automobile manufacturers and service providers through the products and services made available through telematics.
Since these infotainment systems integrate entertainment and information within a common envelope, the systems need to be highly integrated, open and configurable. However, the electronic systems currently on the market are custom designed for the make, model, year and world region in which the vehicle is sold. Additionally, the electronic systems being used today are linked by proprietary busses having severely limited bandwidth that are inadequate for data-intensive services combining information entertainment and safety. The proprietary and customized systems require a developer to know the underlying software and hardware application program interfaces (APIs) in order to develop applications for future infotainment systems. However, numerous proprietary and customized systems are spread across the various makes and models of the vehicles in the marketplace and even within the same model from year to year. Thus, the heterogeneous nature of the various systems essentially eliminates any benefits of economies of scale since equipment and software must be tailored to each model permutation.
Furthermore, the embedded boards that are used by vehicle manufacturers are tied with respect to mission critical systems, however they are difficult to work with for a developer. More particularly, the developing and testing of an application that provides functionality for telematics systems associated with a vehicle is burdensome not only because of the heterogeneous nature of the multitude of embedded boards used, but also because of the configuration of embedded boards in general, i.e., limited memory, serial ports, etc., that require obtaining specialized hardware for a developer to work with the systems. It should be appreciated that since some of these boards are not equipped with local storage, the board must be coupled to a personal computer that has a special software program that can load the operating system over a network. Additionally, debugging the application on the board itself requires tying into a serial port of the board and reviewing generated text. These barriers would deter an independent developer from providing infotainment applications outside of the mission critical vehicle system applications provided by vehicle manufacturers. The embedded boards as described herein, include at least one microprocessor configured to execute the telematics applications.
A self-contained personal computer model, also referred to as the fat client model, has been proposed to provide a uniform standard across makes and models of vehicles. Here, the client performs the bulk of the data processing operations. However, there are a number of shortcomings of this model. For instance, the tightly coupled operating system/hardware architecture does not provide multi-platform support. Additionally, desktop operating systems are too general purpose and too large to fit in the restricted physical envelope of telematics devices. More importantly, the susceptibility to viruses and the general lack of security would be an unacceptable risk for the automobile manufacturer.
In view of the forgoing, there is a need for a system and method to encourage independent developers to develop and test applications for execution by a telematics control unit in order for a wide range of functionality to be made available to telematics consumers.